Turning Fremont into Fray-mone

With the A’s signing the deal on the land for Cisco Field today, seems like a good time to open a thread on that proposal again — sorry, solrac.

Sometimes it appears that Marine Layer, the author of the New A’s Ballpark blog, knows as much about the proposal as Lew Wolff. This week he analyzed the A’s economic impact statement. One tidbit is that Fremont is 15 miles away from the nearest upscale retail — places like Abercrombie & Fitch, Pottery Barn and Restoration Hardware. They’re all no closer than Pleasanton, San Jose or Palo Alto. That’s a big gap for a market area of almost 400,000 residents.

With the ballpark to draw crowds and the Ballpark Village housing to attract wealthier residents, the retail space the A’s are proposing to build should be attractive to those kinds of stores. That’s got to be part of Wolff’s thinking — and that of the city of Fremont, which stands to gain sales taxes and become a more prestigious address with higher home prices.

Some folks might say that the last thing the Bay Area needs is any more cities becoming gentrified — but people who would argue that probably don’t own real estate in Fremont. Heck, they’d probably put an accent mark over the “e” and Frenchify the pronunciation into Fray-mone.